Synopsis

Swiss filmmaker Steff Gruber finds a video guide for sex tourists on the internet. He believes he recognizes his Thai ex-girlfriend Malee in the video and finds himself obsessed with wondering what became of her. Finally, after 25 years, he travels back to Southeast Asia to look for Malee.
This is the beginning of an eventful journey that takes the filmmaker all across Southeast Asia. In his travels, he meets several so-called expats - western emigrants, looking to try their luck in Southeast Asia.
One of these expats recognizes Malee in a photograph, and also remembers her boyfriend as well, the supposed creator of the sex travel video who goes by the name of Roman Guy. Now the search for Malee shifts to a search for Roman Guy.
The filmmaker learns that Roman Guy was very well known in the expats scene at that time, and notorious as well, for his alleged contacts with the CIA. However, he seems to have disappeared over a decade ago. Meanwhile, old footage that was recorded with a hidden camera in Cambodia in the 90s surfaces. A friend plays the footage for Gruber. It show countless prostitutes and their external circumstances from the time when the UN peace corps of the UNTAC (United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia) were stationed in the country.
In one of the videos the filmmaker finds a further clue to the sought-after Malee.

Gruber’s film weaves together the different destinies of Asian girls and aging emigrants along with the historical video footage to produce a remarkably complex tapestry of the culturally changing Southeast Asia.
The odyssey, which borrows its structure from Joseph Conrad’s "Heart of Darkness", ends in the border triangle of Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Where the Ho Chi Minh trail once ended, Roman Guy resides in a jungle brothel completely isolated from the modern world. The film ends in an analogy of a Conrad sentence: "Do me a favor: tell them all I’ve done, everything that you’ve seen. Because if there is one thing I hate, it is the stench of lies."